Tame is a Beautiful, Real-Time Digest of your Twitter Timeline

Twitter is great to find out what’s happening in the world. But the more people you follow on Twitter, the more overwhelming it can get. Soon, your timeline is updating so fast that it’s easy to miss out on the important stuff — the hashtags that matter and people in your timeline who are important at the moment.

There are plenty of services to try and make your Twitter usage easier, like Favstar and Know About It. There’s even Trendsmap to find out the trending topics. But either these services are non-intuitive or are not personalized to your Twitter timeline.

Obviously, you want to know the best of what should matter to you, based on your friends and your lists. Tame does just that, and looks darn good doing it.Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.

What’s Tame All About?

Tame wants to cut through the noise and makes sense of your timeline and lists, and also provides you details of people, links and trends when you search about anything.

It does this by relying on smart algorithms. Tame refuses to go into the details of how it works, apart from saying that rather than the number of retweets, they focus on “diversity and quality of success” — whatever that means!

All In Good Time

That mystical algorithm only works on data in the last 24 hours. But what’s cool is that with a slider, you can set the amount of time in the past 24 hours that Tame analyzes.

Move the slider and Tame will automatically update you to show how many tweets were in your chosen category — Timeline, Lists or Search — in that time period.

It’s a quick snapshot of everything from the past few hours. It’s a great tool to use to catch up on things that happened when you were sleeping, or if you were stuck in meetings all day without access to Twitter.

Links, Topics & People

As I mentioned, there are three main, self-explanatory categories: Timeline, List and Search. You can choose the list you want to analyze, and use advanced search options such as search by language or tweets with images and videos.

Each category’s results are divided into three columns: Links, Topics and People. Links shows all the URLs shared with you in that time period; Topics are the most important hashtags you should check out; and People shows the users that have been mentioned most often.

By default, you can only see the top 10 results in each column. But you can always expand that for more results.

Each result has a small drop-down pane to expand that result and learn more about it. For example, in the drop-down of a link, you’ll find out why that link is important based on the tweets in your timeline. Similarly, a result in People or Topics will show you the tweets that make that result relevant.

I have to say, the whole interface is beautiful. It’s definitely the most beautiful Twitter analytics app that I have seen. The colours, the flat design, the fonts — it just works.

So How Well Does It Work?

Of course, it’s one thing to claim that a smart algorithm is going to find exactly what’s important to you, it’s another to see how it works.

In my case, Tame actually did a good job. Being a Twitter addict, I often start scrolling back through my timeline to see what I missed. So I did a little experiment. When I hadn’t checked my timeline for 10 hours, I started up Tame and had it scan the last 12 hours worth of tweets.

Meanwhile, I started going through my timeline manually and noted the tweets that drew my attention. At the end of it, I had 22 tweets that drew my attention. I then turned to cross-check them with Tame.

Of the 22 tweets, 18 were reflected in one of the three categories, and the top link, hashtag and person were exactly who I had marked as the most interesting for me.

Short answer: Yeah, Tame works really well! That said, Tame issues a warning about its own limitations: “If your network is very heterogenous and noisy – you’ll get erratic and noisy results.”

Good To Read, Bad To Write

Since you are checking out all your tweets in one place, you probably want to respond to them too. That is Tame’s biggest failing at the moment.

Sure, there’s an option to compose a tweet, but it’s severely limited. It doesn’t auto-complete the handles of your friends, it doesn’t shorten long URLs, and there’s no option to attach an image.

And if there’s any tweet you want to reply to, Tame opens up a pop-up window with the default interface, ruining the wonderful design of Tame. Ugh!

Pricing

The free plan of Tame restricts you to only your Timeline working properly. In Lists and Searches, you can only see the results for Topics, there’s no access to Links or People, nor the ability to write tweets.

For their more advanced accounts, here’s the breakdown:

Wrapping Up

So is Tame worth it? Like me, if you mostly access your timeline and aren’t much for lists or search, then Tame is a great way to keep up with what’s happening. For personal use for power users, Tame isn’t worth it in the free edition, and 5€/m is a pretty high price.

But if you’re a social media professional, then Tame is definitely worth the money — in fact, it’s a steal at that price, especially for the search features that will help you keep on top of your business and its related fields.

Summary

Tame
Reviewed by Mihir Patkar on
Aug 22.
Tame wants to cut through the noise and makes sense of your timeline and lists, and also provides you details of people, links and trends when you search about anything.
Rating:
8 out of
10